The Only Explanation

Recently there have been some hijinks over at ESPN.com's baseball transaction page. Many people caught the inclusion of the deceased Corey Lidle being activated by the Blue Jays but few people caught the Yankee transaction of adding Felix Heredia who hasn't played a game since the 2005 season.

You can see both transactions listed in this screen grab via David Scott.

ESPN.com says that they use a third party company for these transactions but declined to blame that company for the mistake (they were only addressing the Lidle issue).

The way I see it - the most likely explanation is not some software glitch but instead just a couple of guys goofing around. I can see two guys at that third party company talking about their favorite teams. One guy is probably a Yankees fan and one guy a Blue Jays fan.

The Blue Jay fan maybe made a comment about the Yankee bullpen being awful. So awful that a guy like Felix Heredia who's been out of baseball could probably improve the situation. So for a laugh the Blue Jay guy tosses in a joke transaction just to tweak his Yankee fan co-worker.

The Yankee fan, not to be out-done, thinks that the Blue Jay pitchers are a bunch of stiffs and who's a bigger stiff than Corey Lidle (groan). He tries to one-up the Blue Jay guy but the "joke" was just too noticeable and they get caught.

If it was just Felix Heredia - this probably would have gone by mostly un-noticed. I wouldn't be surprised if these guys had been doing this off and on for a long time.